About the Letters

I can't remember why I started writing back....

Was I mad as hell and not taking it anymore?
Did my insatiable mean streak miss a feeding?
Did I see an opportunity to generate a few cheap laughs?

These all seem like viable reasons... but are writing ridiculous letters to mostly dead addresses and trying to lure the authors behind the functional ones into an increasingly absurd dialog justifiable?

I don't know. While I'm sorting out the ethics involved, you can read these.

Jon
jland@incomplete.net

P.S. If there's one entertaining thing to come out of this site, it's the fact that when spammers have their tools scraping as many email addresses as they can find from the web they'll hit this site and have tons of email that'll just bounce right back at them.

In The Media

TheSpamLetters.com has been featured in Entertainment Weekly, New York Newsday, The New York Times weekly Circuits e-mail column, The Daily Mirror (twice), .net Magazine (twice), The Washington Post, Bizarre Magazine, Slashdot (twice), The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Houston Chronicle, WCCO-TV, KRLD, and almost 200 various websites.

Media Contact

No Starch Press:
Leigh Sacks
leigh@nostarch.com
(415) 863-9900

About the Author

Jonathan Land has worn out many hats and much welcome over the years. He grew up in New York City (really, in Manhattan itself) and could frequently be found at ungodly hours on school nights of his formative high school period at either WBAI-FM as an Arts Department producer, composer, and timid on-air personality or at CBGBs as your garden variety delinquent teen.

Jonathan Land graduated from Hampshire College in 1997, majoring in the highly unprofitable fields of mathematics and music. He's incorporated both into an overly ambitious 4.5 hour composition on the net which has sadly been burned. He's spent the intervening time as a web developer, a stick figure artist (not a joke, see http://incomplete.net/ for details), and a member of the experimental musical group Negativland, which specializes in making art that goofs on the media whenever possible. He's made appearances on an E.P. with one-hit wonders (in America, at least) Chumbawamba, and on a compilation of reworked pieces from Fiddler on the Roof for Knitting Factory Works records.

Jonathan Land (Do I really need to keep up this third person charade? Would anyone else be writing this?) currently resides in the lovely Hudson Valley region of New York with his guinea pig and two rabbits. Their cuteness helps offset his overwhelming negativity. He currently receives about 30-50 spams a day and would be the wealthiest man in Nigeria if only he could manage to take his business transactions seriously.